Steve Rasnic Tem: Shadow

“I just wasn’t prepared for them, to have so much shadow enter my life.”

The man in the video is your Uncle Mark, but you hardly recognize him. His face is puffy, unshaven, dirty. You recognize his weary voice only because of the resemblance to other male voices in your family. The poor sound quality emphasizes the weariness in his voice, in the world from which he speaks. This equipment is old—you haven’t watched television in years. At a certain point you found it too irritating to bear—the sounds it made actually hurt your brain. But you can’t remember exactly when that was. If the video player hadn’t already been hooked up to the television you would have been helpless to make it work. You are surrounded, in fact, by numerous appliances you never use and have forgotten how.

You wonder how old he was when he made this recording. You’re not good with ages, especially where men are concerned, but you think he might have been ten years older than you are now, which would place him in his early fifties. You think you must have been eight or nine years old, just a little girl, when he died. Which means, what? You must try to keep yourself from being annoyed by all these numbers because you will no longer be able to sit here and watch this man and find out some things. What, exactly, those things will be and what use you will make of them you have no idea. You do not want to be annoyed—bad things happen when you are annoyed.

Thirty years. It’s been more than thirty years since he made this recording. You wonder if he would be surprised by how different the world is now. From the look of his face you think not.

His lighting is harsh, inexpert, overpowering. Why so much light? Then you notice how it is concentrated in the area immediately around him, as if he were enveloped in some brilliant bubble. The rest of the room is gloomy, hung with curtains, sheets, bedspreads. You think of sailing ships, although you have never actually seen one outside old magazines. Sheets and curtains shroud the furniture, smother the windows.

He says nothing more for a while. He rearranges the lamps, moving them forward, in and out of the frame, burning your eyes so that you have to look away.

“I won’t be seeing you again,” he says, finally. “And you won’t much care, if this is my niece and nephew watching this. But I do wish you well.”

Steve Rasnic Tem: Carnal House

Gene’s phone rang again, the third time that evening. “Yes?” he asked again, as if the very ring were his name.

“Are you coming over, Gene? Could you come over?”

He held back any immediate reaction. He didn’t want her to hear him sigh, or groan. He didn’t want her to hear the catch he knew was waiting in his throat.

“Ruth,” he said.

“Who else could it be?” she said, as if in accusation.

For just a second he felt like defying her, telling her about Jennie. The impulse chilled him. She couldn’t know about Jennie. Not ever. “No other woman,” he finally said.

She was silent for a time, but he knew she was still there. He could hear the wind worrying at the yellow window-shade in her bedroom. Her window would be closed, he knew, but it would leak badly. There would be a draft that went right through the skin. But none of that would bother her.

“Come over, Gene,” she finally said.

“Okay. I’ll be there.”

“I’ll wait,” she said, as if there were a choice. He hung up the phone.

The house was at the end of a long back street on the west end of town. It was one of the oldest in the area, its lines ornate, archaic, and free of the various remodeling fads that had passed through this neighborhood over the years. Gene had always appreciated the dignity of the Victorian style.

But he also knew that Victorians could be extraordinarily ugly, and this house was a perfect representative of that type. The exterior color seemed to be a mix of dark blue, dark green, and gray, which resulted in a burnt stew of a shade, a rotting vegetable porridge. The paint had been thickly applied, splatters and drips of it so complicating the porch lines and filigreed braces under the roof that they looked like dark, coated spiderwebs. The windows and doors were shadowed rectangles; he couldn’t make out their details from the street.

Steve Rasnic Tem: Bodies and Heads

In the hospital window the boy’s head shook no no no. Elaine stopped on her way up the front steps, fascinated.

The boy’s chest was rigid, his upper arms stiff. He seemed to be using something below the window to hold himself back, with all his strength, so that his upper body shook from the exertion.

She thought of television screens and their disembodied heads, ever so slightly out of focus, the individual dots of the transmitted heads moving apart with increasing randomness so that feature blended into feature and face into face until eventually the heads all looked the same: pinkish clouds of media flesh.

His head moved no no no. As if denying what was happening to him. He had been the first and was now the most advanced case of something they still had no name for. Given what had been going on in the rest of the country, the Denver Department of Health and Hospitals had naturally been quite concerned. An already Alert status had become a Crisis and doctors from all over—including a few with vague, unspecified governmental connections—had descended on the hospital.

Although it was officially discouraged, now and then in the hospital’s corridors she had overheard the whispered word zombie.

“Jesus, will you look at him!”

Elaine turned. Mark planted a quick kiss on her lips. “Mark

somebody will see

” But she made no attempt to move away from him.

“I think they already know.” He nibbled down her jawline. Elaine thought to pull away, but could not. His touch on her body, his attention, had always made her feel beautiful. It was, in fact, the only time she ever felt beautiful.

Steve Rasnic Tem: Tricks & treats: One Night on Halloween Street

TRICKS

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE last time they'd all go trick or treating together, but it didn't seem right that the gang go out now that Tommy was dead.

Every year all the gang had gone trick or treating together: Allison and Robbie, Maryanne and John, Sandra and Willona and Felix and Randall. And Tommy. They'd been doing it since fourth grade. Now they were teenagers, and they figured this was the last time. The last chance to do it up right.

Not that they'd ever done anything particularly malicious on Halloween. A few soaped windows. A few mailboxes full of cow shit. Not much more than that.

But Tommy had said this particular Halloween needed to be special. "For chrissakes, it's the last time.!"

But then Tommy had died in that big pileup on the interstate. They'd all gone to the funeral. They'd seen the casket lowered into the ground, the earth dark as chocolate. It wasn't like in the movies. This movie, Tommy's movie, would last forever. Sandra kept saying that word, "forever," like it was the first time she'd ever heard it.

The dead liked playing tricks. She figured that out quick. Dying was a great trick. It was great because people just couldn't believe it. You'd play the trick right in front of their eyes and they still just couldn't believe it.

He'd only been dead a week when Sandra wondered if Tommy's life itself had been a trick. She couldn't remember his face anymore. Even when she looked at pictures of him something' felt wrong. Tommy had this trick: he was never going to change, and because he didn't change she couldn't remember what he looked like.

Sandra and Willona had both had crushes on Tommy. And now he was going to be their boyfriend forever. He used to take them both to the horror shows, even the ones they were too young for. He knew places he could get them in. Sandra thought about those shows a lot -- she figured Willona did, too. Tommy loved the

horror shows. Now he was the star of his own horror show that played in their heads every night. He'd always be with them, because they just couldn't stop thinking about him.

Steve Rasnic Tem: Vintage Domestic

She used to tell him that they'd have the house forever. One day their children would live there. When Jack grew too old to walk, or to feed himself, she would take care of him in this house. She would feed him right from her own mouth, with a kiss. He'd always counted on her keeping this promise.

But as her condition worsened, as the changes accelerated, he realized that this was a promise she could not keep. The roles were to be reversed, and it was to be he who fed his lifetime lover with a kiss full of raw meat and blood. Sweet, domestic vintage.

Early in their marriage his wife had told him that there was this history of depression in her family. That's the way members of the family always talked about it: the sadness, the melancholy, the long slow condition. Before he understood what this meant he hadn't taken it that seriously, because at the time she never seemed depressed. Once their two oldest reached the teen years, however, she became sad, and slow to move, her eyes dark stones in the clay mask of her face, and she stopped telling him about her family's history of depression. When he asked her about the old story, she acted as if she didn't know what he was talking about.

At some point during her rapid deterioration someone had labeled his family "possibly dysfunctional." Follow-up visits from teachers and social workers had removed "possibly" from his family's thickening file. Studies and follow-up studies had been completed, detailed reports and addenda analyzing his children's behavior and the family dynamics. He had fought them all the way, and perhaps they had tired of the issue, because they finally gave up on their investigations. His family had weathered their accusations. He had protected his wife and children, fulfilled his obligations. Finally people left them alone, but they could not see that something sacred was occurring in this house.

The house grew old quickly. But not as quickly as his wife and children.

"You're so damned cheerful all the time," she said to him. "It makes me sick."

At one time that might have been a joke. Looking into her gray eyes at this moment, he knew it was not. "I'm maintaining," he said. "That's all." He thought maybe her vision was failing her. He was sure it had been months since he'd last smiled. He bent over her with the tea, then passed her a cracker. She stretched her neck and tried to catch his lips in her teeth. He expected a laugh but it didn't come.